


Perfection

by Mithen



Category: Time Master Series - Louise Cooper
Genre: F/M, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-04
Updated: 2010-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-13 12:33:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/137383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cyllan explores her new home in the Realm of Chaos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [water_bby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/water_bby/gifts).



Cyllan feels her body swept away from her.

The moment she enters the Realm of Chaos, it is torn from her consciousness as casually and heedlessly as an abandoned garment, lost on a surging tide of madness. Her soul hangs disembodied in a tumult of wild images: colors that sing, dreams with dripping fangs. A howling maelstrom of slate-colored pebbles roars around her and is turned just as quickly to a double helix of rose petals that ring like crystal. Colors she has never imagined before, _could_ never have imagined before, flare and ripple around her, through her. A small part of her knows that she should feel terror, but she can sense the sheltering thoughts of her love cradling her naked spirit, and she feels only exhilaration and a strange dark rapture.

 _Tarod!_ she cries out wordlessly, her thoughts reaching to him. She is weeping and laughing at once, eldritch emotions gusting across her soul as she struggles to encompass her new home. _Help me!_

Tarod’s voice is luminous and vast, but she can hear her lover’s mortal tones beneath the resonance of the god. “Reach out with your thoughts, Cyllan. Make yourself a new body from the stuff of Chaos.”

She concentrates, trying to set aside the disquieting sights and sounds fluctuating around her, and a silken skein of tiny lights shivers and coalesces for a moment, then dissipates again. _Show me,_ she implores. _I can’t control it._

She can see him now, his dark hair floating like mist in the currents of Chaos, his smile the sliver of a distant crescent moon. “You’re trying too hard, my love. You will be able to soon enough. But for now, let me...” He gestures with one long-fingered hand and a silver light brightens the air, growing and solidifying into a human shape. Limbs of purest alabaster, hair like sculpted ivory, a wide mouth touched with a kiss of cinnabar: the form before her opens its eyes and they are purest glowing saffron, an amber so bright and fiery it leaves afterimages on her thoughts. It is the Cyllan she has seen reflected back from still water, but with all the mortal dross scrubbed away, transcendent and sublime.

She feels laughter bubbling in her, fracturing her consciousness with pure delight and amusement. _I can’t go around in that!_ she exclaims.

Tarod frowns, staring at his work. Then a sly smile touches his mouth. “I had forgotten already,” he says. “Mortal scruples...” With a gesture he drapes a loose robe woven of starlight and emeralds around the naked form. “Better?”

She lets affectionate exasperation color her thoughts. _No, I mean...Tarod, my love, don’t you think that’s a bit...much?_ she asks, flicking a thought at the dazzling avatar. _I don’t look like that, not really._

A look of chagrin, familiar and dear, flickers across Tarod’s narrow face. “It is not nearly as lovely as you are to me,” he whispers.

Touched by his words and the look in his eyes, she moves closer to the form, nestles within it. With a sudden jolting shift of perception, she is embodied again and in Tarod’s arms, laughing.

He kisses her, and his lips are bitter as myrrh, cool and smoldering at once. “Welcome home, Bride of Chaos,” he murmurs, and she feels a ripple of languid ecstasy roll through her new body, causing her to shudder against him.

They caress each other on waves of raw Chaos which shift beneath them from silk to narcotic-tipped thorns to opalescent flames. “I can make your pleasure last a thousand thousand years,” he says, his voice silken against her breasts, her thighs. “All of Time is ours.”

When it comes, the moment of ecstasy seems to last an endless time in which she twists and burns, lost to anything but the pure, wild sensation of his love.

His eyes are the first thing she sees when time moves again, and their sated velvet makes her smile and stretch, pleased with herself. He kisses her throat. “I’m afraid, love, I must leave you for a time. I have responsibilities to fulfill here, things I have neglected. It will not be long.”

“Take me with you,” she says, but he shakes his head.

“Some of the things I must do you would not find...pleasant.” He licks his lips and for a moment his face is not at all mortal. “Explore your new world, love. You are safe here,” he adds at the look in her eyes. He holds up her wrist, where Yandros’s kiss is a silver filigree against the marble perfection. “This will safeguard you. And for extra measure...” He puts his lips to her other wrist and pleasure sparks along her nerve endings, making her gasp. When he lifts his head she has another silver mark to match the first one. “No one will dare to touch you,” he says with satisfaction.

He bids her farewell as an eerie pale light suffuses the world around them. “I will come to you soon,” he says, and is gone like a ripple on water.

She raises her arms and looks at her flawless, gemlike hands for a moment. Then she pushes her thoughts away and sets out to investigate the world of Chaos.

She wanders far--a spaceless space in which the world seems to twist around her more than she moves through it. She stands alone on a spur made of a single diamond, jutting from an endless sea of molten gold. She watches stars billow and collapse into incandescent streamers across an ebony sky. She sees a field of silver flowers, a solid sheet of argent glory, rippling in a sapphire wind. She learns much of beauty--and not merely what her mortal senses would once have called beautiful. She comes to appreciate the delicate dance of corruption and rot, the gleaming phosphorescence of decay. The dissonant wails that sometimes cut across the world hold a new savor for her. The fascination of disintegration, the allure of entropy: all these are mysteries no longer, but merely a new kind of delight.

She explores and gains in knowledge and power, in subtlety and wisdom. She learns that Chaos cannot be controlled, it can only be understood and embraced.

She has always been able to embrace Chaos.

When Tarod comes to her again, he smiles to find her sitting on a rock by a dark gray sea, listening to the _fanaani_ sing. Her jeweled robe is trailing in the water unheeded. She looks up as he comes, her brilliant amber eyes alight. “I’m ready to make myself a body,” she says.

He feels a sting of chagrin at her desire to improve on his gift so quickly, but puts it away as unworthy. After all she has suffered, she deserves any glory she can imagine. “Would you like to be a _fanaan_ for a little while?” he asks, half-teasing, but she merely smiles and closes her eyes, raising a hand.

On the shore, a form coalesces. Pale, weathered skin, pallid hair in a rough peasant’s cut that frames a wide, white face--Tarod feels his soul turn over when it opens its still-empty eyes, no gems but a very human amber-brown. She dresses it in a hand-spun drover’s tunic and breeches, then turns to him, a smile on her flawless ivory lips as she studies his reaction. “Do you like it?” she says softly.

“I could imagine nothing more perfect, my love,” he breathes. He leans in to put his lips to that narrow, wry mouth, and at the touch the dazzling jeweled body dissolves into nothingness and Cyllan’s warm mouth opens under his, laughing and altogether dear, leaning into his kiss.

“Perfection,” he whispers again, and pulls her close under a sky full of endless stars.


End file.
